83 results found
The overall goal of the Arcus Great Ape Program (GAP) is to achieve conservation and respect for great apes and gibbons. The foundation tracks and assesses the progress and effects of the Great Ape Program through a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system that enables it to gather and analyze data from a variety of sources—grantees, conservationists in the field and in academic research settings, and relevant databases—to measure progress along specific indicators and milestones to assess the status of goals, outcomes, and targets. The 2016 Monitoring and Evaluation report presents the program's progress against baselines set in 2010;highlights important issues that will inform and shape broader strategy of GAP; and provides a indication of impact since the previous 2013 evaluation and 2010 baselines.
While a lot of research has been done on the role of philanthropy in the United States' higher education system, there is considerably less literature on U.S. and non-U.S. foundations that have funded international scholarship and fellowship programs that focus on social justice, particulary in the last two decades. This study shares findings and reflections about recent initiatives and offers recommendations on what we know is working effectively in this growing landscape. This paper aims to investigate three key questions:Why are U.S. and non-U.S. foundations increasingly interested in investing in international higher education?Why are philanthropies currently focusing on higher education as a form of international development for social change?What can we learn from recent higher education programs that have brought about positive change in social justice through scholarships and fellowships?Notably, we examine scholarship and fellowship programs that are committed to reducing long-standing disparities in higher education. Our study suggests that philanthropic giving for higher education initiatives that specifically promote access and equity among underserved and marginalized communities deserve critical attention and more research. This observation is the principal motive for our study.
The concept of community philanthropy continues to take shape across countries. Researchers and civil society development institutions in many countries are concerned with the same questions: what role community philanthropy plays in local development, what ideas and resources are invested in it, and how it can be measured and evaluated.We asked ourselves the same questions within the Program for Support of Community Philanthropy implemented by CAF Russia. Together with community foundations involved in the program we started to look for solutions. New research presented in this report demonstrates the use of ACT (Assets-Capacity-Trust) framework to find answers to these questions. This report highlights what we found important, what were the results and the impact of the work.
From 2014 through 2020, eight diverse school districts and two charter management organizations ran a substantial experiment with ways of implementing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in elementary and middle grades, called the California K - 8 NGSS Early Implementers Initiative. The Initiative certainly illustrated that a big financial investment can produce powerful change. However, even districts facing resource challenges may benefit from the lessons that were learned and the strategies that were developed by the Initiative.An external evaluation team has previously released a series of reports on what can be learned from the efforts of the Initiative districts. All reports are intended to be helpful to administrators at the school and district levels, education policymakers, and people charged with designing and/or delivering science professional learning. After briefly describing how the NGSS call for big shifts in science teaching and learning, this highlights report shares high-level, major learnings from the evaluation, distilled into only a couple dozen pages of main narrative. The report describes NGSS instruction as a powerful lever for equitable learning, explains how the Initiative made this kind of instruction happen, and describes the importance of the Initiative's ambitious professional learning for administrators.
In its fourth consecutive year, NewsMatch 2019 continued to seek to strengthen the sustainability of the nonprofit news sector by building capacity in nonprofit newsrooms, spreading awareness of the importance of investing in journalism among the general public, and directly and indirectly investing millions of dollars into the field of nonprofit journalism.Overall, this evaluation concludes that NewsMatch is an invaluable program for the nonprofit news field. The NewsMatch team implemented the 2019 program activities as planned very effectively. Based on the findings of this evaluation, the Third Plateau team concluded that this program is important and it is in good hands.
he first five years of children's lives are fundamental to their growth and development. Many children in this age group spend a substantial amount of time being cared for by extended family, friends, or neighbors. Informal care—or Family, Friend, and Neighbor (FFN) care —is both an affordable and a flexible form of care and a way to provide children with a warm, nurturing environment with a trusted caregiver. In 2014, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation's Children, Families, and Communities program launched a 10-year Informal Care Strategy to support FFN caregivers — both nationally and within California — as they provide the kinds of nurturing and enriching experiences children need early in life to reach full potential.Engage R+D has been the evaluation partner of the Packard Foundation for its Informal Care strategy since 2016. Individual-level and cross-cutting evaluations of its FFN grants showed promising results in terms of their ability to have positive impacts on caregivers. However, as of 2019, the Foundation had not yet conducted a comprehensive study of the third phase of its investment strategy, which related to scaling the most promising practices. This report synthesizes a range of lessons and implications for those interested in supporting and scaling FFN programs, including funders, community organizations, and advocacy groups.
The COVID-19 pandemic has required educators to make a seismic shift to distance learning, first on an emergency basis early in the crisis, and now with some amount of pre-planning in fall 2020. Many educators are concerned that distance learning exacerbates students' inability to access and engage in high-quality math learning. Educators are particularly concerned about learning for the groups of students that, prior to the pandemic, were already performing less well than average on the state math achievement test: Black students, English learner students, and students with disabilities.Before COVID-19, there was already a growing awareness that school site leaders' instructional leadership could be critical for raising student achievement. The pandemic further highlighted the potential for targeted leadership development to improve math teaching and learning in California schools at a moment when achievement gaps could be widening.Findings from WestEd's evaluation of a seven-year initiative called Math in Common may offer some useful insights at this time. Math in Common was organized to support 10 California districts in effectively implementing the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSS-M) across grades K-8. A key part of the effort to improve math teaching and learning in these districts involved providing leadership development opportunities for many types of district and school leaders — from teacher leaders and instructional coaches to principals and district administrators — to help them understand and support the math content and instruction that teachers are expected to use.In this brief, we offer three recommendations for how educators in California and beyond should conceptualize new leadership development opportunities to support math improvement - during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond. We offer these recommendations to a broad audience of educators, administrators, and policymakers concerned with building leaders' capacity for school improvement, including representatives from county offices of education, district central offices, the California Subject Matter Projects, the newly formed California Leadership academies, and leadership associations such as the Association for California School Administrators. To ground our recommendations, we begin with some brief background on the CCSS-M and the Math in Common initiative.
Our nation's democracy has long rested on the notion of opportunity, liberty, and justice for all, yet these hallmarks have been largely reserved for White people at the expense and systemic exclusion of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). Systemic racism in the United States is deeply rooted in our institutions, systems, and narratives about who belongs and who has value. The road to transformation is long and daunting but in this moment of collective trauma "there are glimmers of hope."Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation is a $24 million initiative funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to support 14 multi-sector collaborations in communities across the United States. It serves as a comprehensive, national, and community-based process to plan for and bring about transformational and sustainable change and to address the historic and contemporary effects of racism. In Los Angeles, TRHT-LA is convened by Southern California Grantmakers (SCG). To support continuous learning and document the TRHT-LA journey, SCG partnered with Engage R+D in 2017 to conduct a developmental evaluation. Using a multi-methods approach (interviews, surveys, and observations), the evaluation team focused on lifting-up promising strategies, stories, and evidence that TRHT efforts are taking root.
This 13th report in WestEd's evaluation of the K-8 Early Implementers Initiative for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provides an extensive response to the following question: What does NGSS teaching look like in the classroom? The report also briefly describes specific ways that teachers have advanced in their NGSS teaching over the years of the Initiative and how the Initiative prepared them for such teaching.The report draws most strongly from more than 50 classroom observations of, and interviews with, 24 teachers across six districts. It is also informed by multiple interviews with each district Project Director as well as results of an annual survey with high response rates from more than 500 K-8 science teachers.
Educators and policymakers across the United States recognize a growing urgency to improve the nation's systems of teacher preparation. Ensuring that teachers stay and thrive in the profession depends largely on having system-wide policies and practices in place that address teacher shortages, promote equity and excellence, and cultivate expertise, diversity, and more.The California State University (CSU) system partnered with the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation to launch the New Generation of Educators Initiative (NGEI), in an effort to transform the nature and quality of teacher preparation at both individual CSU campuses and across the CSU system as a whole. To answer the question, "What does it take to transform teacher education?" WestEd and SRI International conducted an evaluation to examine and share learnings about the CSU-led effort to implement large-scale clinically oriented teacher preparation reform.As part of a series of new evaluation reports that explore key transformational elements of effective teacher preparation programs, this paper addresses how programs can expand their capacity to use data for continuous improvement through the following levers:Lever 1: Develop data sources that can inform improvement effortsLever 2: Delineate clear roles to support continuous improvementLever 3: Build an infrastructure for efficient data entry and analysisLever 4: Establish a culture of improvement through routines for data review and use
Educators and policymakers across the United States recognize a growing urgency to improve the nation's systems of teacher preparation. Ensuring that teachers stay and thrive in the profession depends largely on having system-wide policies and practices in place that address teacher shortages, promote equity and excellence, and cultivate expertise, diversity, and more.The California State University (CSU) system partnered with the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation to launch the New Generation of Educators Initiative (NGEI), in an effort to transform the nature and quality of teacher preparation at both individual CSU campuses and across the CSU system as a whole. To answer the question, "What does it take to transform teacher education?" WestEd and SRI International conducted an evaluation to examine and share learnings about the CSU-led effort to implement large-scale clinically oriented teacher preparation reform.As part of a series of new evaluation reports that explore key transformational elements of effective teacher preparation programs, this paper reviews the evolution of a system of support for NGEI campuses that included targeted grant requirements, coaching and technical assistance, and a learning community to help partnerships share problems of practice. The following levers supported NGEI campuses to undergo rapid transformation, while implementing reforms in systematic, sustainable, and context-specific ways:Lever 1: Balance grant requirements with flexibility and responsive supportLever 2: Customize technical assistance support to meet partnership needsLever 3: Embed opportunities for cross-networked learning and collaboration
Educators and policymakers across the United States recognize a growing urgency to improve the nation's systems of teacher preparation. Ensuring that teachers stay and thrive in the profession depends largely on having system-wide policies and practices in place that address teacher shortages, promote equity and excellence, and cultivate expertise, diversity, and more.The California State University (CSU) system partnered with the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation to launch the New Generation of Educators Initiative (NGEI), in an effort to transform the nature and quality of teacher preparation at both individual CSU campuses and across the CSU system as a whole. To answer the question, "What does it take to transform teacher education?" WestEd and SRI International conducted an evaluation to examine and share learnings about the CSU-led effort to implement large-scale clinically oriented teacher preparation reform.As part of a series of new evaluation reports that explore key transformational elements of effective teacher preparation programs, this paper describes how participating CSU campuses and their partner school districts strengthened their relationships and developed strategic partnerships to establish the necessary foundations for high-quality, clinically oriented programming.This paper identifies four levers that can be operationalized in order to sustain strong partnerships between stakeholders:Lever 1: Create and operationalize a shared visionLever 2: Identify key rolesLever 3: Ensure space and time to collaborateLever 4: Share data to identify needs and monitor progress
Showing 12 of 83 results
Use this form to customize and generate the code you need to display this content in your own environment - no programming required. The feed will inherit more specific styles, like font face and font color, from your website.
Your code
Preview
